Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [101]
At the very end of Tehran, just beyond the city’s municipal limits, where buildings and sand melt into one another, a cluster of perhaps 200 haphazardly built houses is carved into a seemingly arbitrary patch of desert, separated from anything else by patches of wasteland, around a small mud dome. It would be easy to mistake the dome for a natural formation, were it not for the flag and the muezzin’s loudspeaker at the top, which reveal it to be a Persian shrine, this one built 800 years ago in honor of the prophet known elsewhere as Jesus Christ. The shrine, Emamzadeh ‘Isa, has given this settlement its name.
Fifteen years earlier, the mud dome had been the only feature on the landscape. Then, in the 1990s, one or two houses appeared. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, streets and electricity arrived: The man who owned the land had persuaded a local official to allow, or at least to ignore, his subdivision of the land. These houses at first were crude constructions of handmade bricks, with water tanks on top, but some owners have slowly added wrought-iron gates and stucco or even marble cladding. Gas, electricity, and water lines are connected, though water is still delivered by truck. Satellite dishes proliferate.
“This is a good place to live, because it’s one of the few places where someone from a village can buy a house today, if he has saved for many years,” says Jafa Asadi, a 40-year-old resident of Emamzadeh ‘Isa, who runs one of the three real-estate agencies whose improbable presence marks the most visible and successful form of commerce on the arrival city’s dusty main street. “Most people here are small traders, craftsmen, or self-employed as construction workers, mechanics, technicians. The majority of people here came from rural areas; they are farmers’ sons—they learned a skill or a trade and used it to urbanize themselves,” he tells me over tea. The land was very cheap at first—for $1,500 you could buy land, and for another $1,500 you could buy a small house. Then you could bring your family. Around 2000, these houses were selling for $3,000 to $4,000; now they are perhaps $20,000. “It’s good business for us,” Jafa says. “And some of the farmers’ sons who moved here are using the property to build a business, if they’re lucky. Those who got in during the early years are doing well. Those who came later have a harder time.”
For 28-year-old Soheila, who arrived here in 2005 from a mountain village in the far western district of Luristan, there is none of this mood of optimism.* We sit down on the top floor of a barren café, and she stares at the floor, speaking quietly but reddening with exasperation. “My parents gave up everything to come here, and they saved all their money to get me into university,” she says. “But now they have nothing, no work, just this house in the sand. Me and my friends are all alone here, there’s no places in school. We were promised so much and there’s nothing.” A petite woman who averts her gaze shyly, she nevertheless wears only the legal minimum head covering, a hair-revealing bright red “bad hijab” that ex-villagers wouldn’t have worn a generation ago. They wouldn’t have spoken out against the government, either, but almost everyone I met here expressed a deep and abiding fury with president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected on promises to improve the lives of the urban poor. And, in private moments, some of the otherwise pious people here speak of their frustration with the revolution itself.
In the summer of 2009, this improvised fringe of Tehran became, improbably, a site of dissent. In those troubled months after Ahmadinejad’s second, contested election victory, there were no protest marches here, no banners hung from windows or occupations of buildings. Those events were mainly in the middle-class districts of central and northern Tehran, carried out by students who had less to lose (though some